I liked covering the cop shop because usually I was telling the reader a story they didn’t know. I was writing about the bad things that can happen. Life in extremis. The underworld that people sitting at their breakfast table with their toast and coffee have never experienced but want to know about. It gave me a certain juice, made me feel like a prince of the city when I drove home at night.

And I knew as I sat there nursing a glass of cheap red wine that I would miss that most about the job.

“You know what I heard,” Larry said to me, his head turned from the sports guys so he could be confidential.

“No, what?”

“That during one of the buyouts in Baltimore this one guy took the check and on his last day he filed a story that turned out to be completely bogus. He just made the whole thing up.”

“And they printed it?”

“Yeah, they didn’t know until they started getting calls the next day.”

“What was the story about?”

“I don’t know but it was like a big ‘fuck you’ to management.”

I sipped some wine and thought about that.

“Not really,” I said.

“What do you mean? Of course it was.”

“I mean the management probably sat around and nodded and said we got rid of the right guy. If you want to say ‘fuck you,’ then you do something that makes them think they messed up by letting you go. That tells them they should’ve picked somebody else.”

“Yeah, is that what you’re going to do?”

“No, man, I’m just going to go quietly into that good night. I’m going to get a novel published and that will be my fuck-you. In fact, that’s the working title. Fuck You, Kramer.”

“Right!”

Bernard laughed and we changed the subject. But while I was talking about other things I was thinking about the big fuck-you. I was thinking about the novel I was going to restart and finally finish. I wanted to go home and start writing. I thought maybe it would help me get through the next two weeks if I had it to go home to each night.